The Icebox Project Space is excited to announce the next resident artist project by Mina Zarfsaz and Matthew Belknap. A Corporeal Orchestration of Sounds is an interactive installation founded in the cross roads between the uniqueness of an individual, bit, beat, sound, and their ability–through collective intervention–to change not only the music, conductor, and orchestra but also the space itself.

A Corporal Orchestration of Sounds pronounces the rhythmic patterns, qualities, and dynamics of power between body and space. This project affords an empathic space for tuning our ears to the presence of others in the space to aspire for a greater effect. Like an orchestra of acoustic instruments, it is the body of the spectator that co-composes the music by coordinating movements with others. All the instruments and the music of this orchestra as well as the physical orientation of the space in which the music is heard is reconstituted by how the spectators together reorganize the rhythmic content. We believe that sound and music can be uniquely effective in forging intimate and visceral connections between spectators and actually elicit changes in thought and behavior. This music has no beginning, no middle and no end. It never repeats itself exactly.

We Do What We Do features works by eighteen artists who incorporate some form of repetition into their studio practices. While each work is the result of a repeated action, the actions themselves vary greatly, from immediate mark making to precise pattern. By highlighting the unifying role of repetition in each artist’s process, this exhibition creates an inclusive environment for participating artists from the Center for Creative Works and artists from the Philadelphia area.

Anachronism and Liberation presents nine artists, ranging from emerging to established, creating work that engages with social and/or political issues in subtle and surprising ways. The artists involved are all committed makers, whose approaches offer an expanded vision of what political art pieces that consider issues of imperialism, political oppression, labor rights, environmental justice, race, gender and sexuality can look like. The work deliberately connects to traditional practices and engages in dialog with art history; at the same time, it is powerfully responsive to the urgency of this political moment.

FJORD Gallery is pleased to announce upcoming group exhibition “Predator, Twilight, Edible”. Curated by Fjord member, Chrissy Scolaro and featuring work by New York based artists Torey Akers, Benjamin Santiago and Tiffany Smith. Through performance, video, photography, sculpture and drawing we are sharing intimate space with work that is pushing the boundaries of self-disclosure as Akers, Santiago and Smith navigate identity-based themes such as communication, history and ego.

Edward Bradley is an outsider whose work has been influenced both by his career in biomedical research, looking at nature at the microscopic and molecular level , and by his strong roots in mid-century minimalism. His thick, almost sculptural surfaces, use of rough and natural media such as plaster, wood, string, and fabric, and subdued color palettes are characteristic of many of his works. As if looking through a microscope at ” low power” – a quick glance at a work across a room, for example, – we see a highly ordered image composed of many seemingly identical components. But under ” higher magnification” the uniqueness of each element, their variation and frequent structural aberrancy emerge. The depth of the work’s surface invites the viewer to look at what is hidden beneath, just out of the viewer’s focal plane. Sometimes written text alluding to a place or event, or a fragment from literature, is inserted into the work to provide an emotional context for it. A quantal perception of all of ” what is” – light, space, time, grace – grounds most of the work presented here.

Jennifer Baker’s ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Northern Liberties is the second exhibition in our Changing Philadelphia series, comprised of three solo exhibitions featuring artwork about Philadelphia neighborhoods.

As Baker shares, “Many of my paintings and monoprints are about the life, death and rebirth of a city neighborhood as I experienced it during three decades as an artist living and working in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia. Throughout the period I painted the fires and the wrecking balls, the dumpers and the downtrodden residents, and then the building and new streetscape that eventually emerged – a whole cycle of urban life in motion around me. The images constitute a visual diary of drawn out, convulsive change.”

The exhibit includes a small survey of Baker’s Northern Liberties paintings and monoprints, from the abandoned buildings and fires of the 80s and 90s to the current period of unrestrained development. The artist notes, “The changing landscape of the neighborhood is of great importance at this time, and Northern Liberties has always been a microcosm of the larger city, often in extreme.” A short text narrative will accompany each image to help tell the story.

It’s always difficult to start in a new shop and get your printing flow. Different equipment, new people, and where the heck is the tarleton anyway?! SSP wants to make it easier for you to get started and get printing. Every Second Thursday, Second State Press will hold shop orientations for members. All are welcome to attend each month.
Also be sure to check out The Quarter Sheet Challenge a revolving exhibition of shop members’ work for which the only restriction is that the 2 pieces must be 15″ x 11″.

Second State Press is in 103B
(in the basement of Crane Arts… enter through lobby)

Spillway Collective presents Sense of Place, an exhibition curated by Mark Basco, featuring works by three Philadelphia artists: Max Budnick, Kathryn Vaughan, and Kenneth Winterschladen. These three artists extract and translate elements of their surroundings into bodies of work, inviting viewers to exercise mindfulness in their own daily routines.

Spillway is located in studio 100B, down the hallway to the left of the Icebox entry hall

Fjord Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition Jump Cut, featuring work by Tony Bragg, Lyla Duey, Jacob Feige, Sarah Kaufman, Erin Murray, Tim Portlock, Paul Rouphail, and Justin Webb. In their inventive representations of domestic, architectural, and landscape subjects, the eight image-makers on display employ direct observation and degrees of speculative manipulation in the creation of paintings, drawings, photographs, and digital renderings. They address perceptual mechanics with shared penchants for stillness, ambiance, and unresolved narrative. The artists here are particularly attentive to the capacity of the camera, computer, pencil, and brush to render illusory light, resulting in a collection of work that rewards slow looking and elicits cinematic resonance.

InLiquid is pleased to present our annual summer art sale at Crane Arts located at 1400 N. American Street. Based on the premise that everyone can be an art collector, AftCP is one of the longest running art festivals in the Kensington/Fishtown area. The best part: all works, by both emerging and established artists alike, are priced at $199 and under. This is a one-of-a-kind event where first-time collectors can speak with artists firsthand about their process, inspiration, and above all: find their niche within the arts scene.

Friday night’s ticketed Kickoff Party serves as a meet-and-greet with the artists and a fundraiser for AIDS Fund, which supports HIV/AIDS education, prevention, and services in the Philadelphia area. Each year the Kickoff Party offers guests an exclusive sneak-peek at the festivities to follow. Attendees at the kickoff event are given the opportunity to purchase work from a selection of the participating artists while enjoying food and light entertainment.

Heshie Zinman is InLiquid’s featured AftCP 2017 Honoree. He is the founder of the LGBT Elder Initiative (LGBTEI), a volunteer-driven, grassroots organization dedicated to building bridges between the aging services network and LGBT older adults. They focus on improving awareness of, and access to, the services offered by the aging services network and those available within LGBT communities. In the ’80s, he also co-founded the AIDS Library of Philadelphia, where he was the executive director for 13 years. Zinman also played an integral part in the start-up of Action AIDS (now Action Wellness), AIDS Fund, SafeGuards Gay Men’s Health Project and Delaware Valley Legacy Fund.
Proceeds from the Art for the Cash Poor 2017 Kickoff are split 50/50 with the AIDS Fund. Find out more about our partner at aidsfundphilly.org.

An exhibition of small works depicting small creatures. At once intriguing, exotic, cute, and scary, Bugs of Paradise explores the undeniable appeal of the tiny critters of the world.

Presented by InLiquid in the newly renovated Grey Area Gallery at the Crane Arts. The exhibition will be on view through June and open during Art for the Cash Poor, InLiquid’s annual summer art fair at Crane Arts.

* The Grey Area is located on the 1st floor of Crane Arts before you reach the Icebox Project Space

WP Galiczynski’s Urban Artist is the first exhibition in our Changing Philadelphia series, comprised of three solo exhibitions featuring artwork about Philadelphia neighborhoods. The artists have been deeply established in their environment for years, or their whole lives. Each body of work is a visual record of the artist’s reaction to and contemplation of the character, life, and transformation of a particular place over time.

Artist member WP Galiczynski’s paintings are inspired by his life and experiences growing up in Olde Kensington, where he still lives today. They are a humorous look at everyday scenes in his community, and depict a sarcastically slanted view of growing up in an urban environment. Galiczynski creates large, framed canvas works, most often acrylic based, drawing out the depth and texture of the painting to complement the compelling images of Philadelphia’s intensity and rawness.

* The InLiquid Hall Gallery is located on the 1st floor of Crane Arts in the hallway to PPAC

Please join Fjord in celebrating the work and contributions of FJORD Members Cameron Masters, Elisa Gabor and AJ Rombach before they depart Philadelphia this summer to continue various personal pursuits. We’re sad to see them leave the city but are so grateful for all of their hard work and cannot want to celebrate in their honor!

SPILLWAY presents the works of Justine Ditto and Megan Webb, each taking a closer look at how objects can exist within multiple identities and experiences in the exhibition, What’s the Matter?

Justine Ditto presents a taxonomy of perceptual and physical qualities associated with a given object, while concealing its identity through measured recognition. Through a scientific lens, Justine dissects and transposes the parts that make up the whole, allowing the viewer to interact with the matter that constructs an experience with a specific object in a new way.

Megan Webb presents paintings of significant, personal objects on ordinary, mundane surfaces. By suturing both intimate and public experiences onto one surface, Megan asks the viewer to consider how these experiences alter the role or importance of everyday items, and vice versa.

* Spillway is located in studio 100B, down the hallway to the left of the Icebox entry hall

Charlie Brooks, Dan Paquet and Jeremy Smith are local artists who also work together for Old City Movers. The common thread weaving their work lives and artistic pursuits together is the “menagerie” of creative personalities that they work with on a daily basis. This show is a testament to that.

‘mid the steep sky’s commotion is the second chapter of Joshua Stamper’s four-part Elements series, exploring the enigmatic and impenetrable quality of wind, its singular and intimate relationship to the detritus of a city, and the ways in which that detritus exists as an echo of the movements, relationships, and dreams of the city of Philadelphia. Joshua Stamper’s unique, colorful, evolving music captures ‘what the wind says’ in this first collaboration with The Crossing.

Wind is the epitome of mystery: it is a force of both destruction and preservation; its origins are inscrutable and its destination is unknown. Its presence echoes through our poems and dreams, yet its patterns and path remain impenetrable-invisible save for its effect on the world around it.
– Joshua Stamper

Paula Cahill – a graduate of Tyler School of Art Temple University and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts – is a tenant at Crane Old School in Philadelphia. She calls her studio a fortress, her kingdom, and has been known to paint for hours on end well into the next morning.

Of the works in Progression, Paula says, “(The) compositions are often created with a single, continuous line that meanders, layers, changes color, moves backward, forward, or connects back to the beginning. Advancing through the painting process is a contemplative,
immersive process for me and I wish the viewer their own momentary immersion as they progress through the composition.”

The Crane Arts & Crane Old School Tenant Gallery is located in the main lobby of Crane Arts (right across from Indigo Arts Gallery!)

SSP is pleased to offer the CRE Fellowship to the printmaking community. Each summer the studio will host an artist whose work demonstrates an uncommon grasp of the printmaking medium and an energetic approach that will likely influence future printmakers. SSP is now accepting applications for 2017 CRE Fellowship! DEADLINE: Monday, May 22nd. Apply HERE

Second State Press is in 103B (in the basement of Crane Arts… enter through lobby)

Spillway Collective presents Behind and Before. By creating a personal “altar”, each artist creates a microcosm of comfort and familiarity previously kept private. These collections of personal effects can serve as both the artists’ interpretations of adoration as well as an insight into the inspirational process that happens behind their polished works. This exhibition transforms Spillway’s gallery into a sanctuary for eight of its members, providing an intimate look into the collections and rituals that guide them in the making process.

Homonym presents seven artists who cast the figure into parallel, interchangeable roles. Within each role, the figures manifest themselves through questions that mirror the viewer’s own presence. Are we submerged within a thought? A memory? Are we a recording of a specific reality? Or are we engulfed within the vast space in our minds, stumbling around as bodiless consciousness?

These questions blur the lines between the mental and physical conditions of being human. Through this exhibition, I intend to show the junctures where those lines meet.

-Sean Hildreth, curator

Sean Hildreth is an artist based in Philadelphia. He received his BFA from SUNY Purchase, and graduated from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in May of 2015 with his MFA. His paintings consist primarily of interiors extracted and observed from within the three-story home he still lives in. His new series of work highlights similar moments out in the world to bring appreciation and awareness to little moments that go unnoticed. Sean has shown in numerous group shows in Philadelphia and in New York. He was awarded the Woodmere Purchase Prize in 2015, and was selected for the Dumfries House Residency in Scotland. He recently co-founded a new artist collective, Spillway, located in the Crane Arts building in Philadelphia.

Chances are, it means that your phone is dead. Modernity’s penchant for busy-ness has finally merged with Google Maps to swallow up our experience of time and place. Opportunity cost is as ever-present as our over determined calendars, collapsing the value of unstructured time spent in unknown spaces. Even escape to the unknown has become increasingly difficult as we are rerouted by our phones towards some inevitable destination, with any detours Yelped to ensure the worthiness of the stop.

The artists in To Chance To Wander are searching for an antidote, however brief and innocuous. Through sculpture, performance, collaboration, film, board games, painting, prose, and print we are searching for the sense of wonder that wandering can restore, coming from perspectives that cross languages, cultures, and our American continents.

As Rebecca Solnit put it in her book, Field Guide to Getting Lost, when “you get lost… the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.” As artists search for that infinite feeling of possibility, they address also the edges and dangers of lostness; the risk that your belonging will be questioned, that your person and senses will be overwhelmed, or that profundity will melt into the mundane.

“The maxim ‘the score is not the music’ suggests that music notation printed on a page is a poor substitute for the sound of the music itself. Printed notes are sterile, an alphabet that allows a musician to produce the right pitches, but which must be interpreted and expanded to be meaningful. If the score—a visual tool—lacks some necessary quality of the music, how else might music be visually conveyed that might better capture its essence?” – Melinda Steffy

Steffy’s current work looks to answer this question by re-interpreting music as color patterns, exploring ideas of translation, how music theory and color theory intersect, and what it’s like to have a song stuck in your head. In this series of work, she has matched the 12 notes of the chromatic scale with 12 hues on a color wheel. Using mathematical constructs like grids and pie charts, she translates masterworks by composers J.S. Bach and Béla Bartók into vibrant color patterns. The music, usually time-based and heard in sequence, becomes spatial, able to be seen all at once. Unexpected patterns emerge, revealing the complexity inherent in the music.

Steffy received an MFA in Painting from The University of the Arts and a BA from Eastern Mennonite University. Her artwork has been on display at Rowan University, the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, Crane Arts, Fringe Wilmington, Sam Quinn Gallery, Villanova University, Finlandia University, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Lancaster Museum of Art, Micro Museum, and Stamford Art Association, among others.

“Shooting sports is as much about capturing the action as it is about presenting the athlete. These days, I’m off the sidelines for the majority of my assignments, instead working in controlled studio environments with elite, perhaps even celebrity, athletes for editorial and commercial projects. Athlete portraiture is all about showing the athlete’s personality, their strengths and weaknesses, their motivation, their intensity, their commitment.”

Steve travels the country to create compelling imagery for advertising and editorial clients. When working with athletes he strives to capture their physicality, intensity, and inherent competitiveness. Steve attended the University of Missouri and received a degree in photojournalism. Before beginning his freelancing career, he spent a year as an assistant & lighting tech for Sports Illustrated and briefly held a desk job as a photo editor at a fitness magazine.

Second State Press is pleased to present the prints of Justine Kelley. She screen prints whimsical and complex worlds by using colorful hand-drawn layers. Nature, animals, and women are often the subject of her prints and zines.

In Kelley’s words:
At the time of this spring Moon, the ground begins to soften and earthworm casts reappear, inviting the return of robins. This is also known as the SapMoon, as it marks the time when maple sap begins to flow and the annual tapping of maple trees begins.

From one moment to the next,from one place to another, from state to state,thought to thought, meaning to meaning. Whether conscious or unconscious, physical or psychological, passages constellate the human experience in situations of territorial, psychological, ceremonial, bodily, and social transitions.
​
But can these liminal states be isolated, described, analyzed, and stably defined? Are we to understand passages as personal or communal phenomena? Or could we conceive of a passage as the vehicle to mediate between binaries, a channel through which the individual and universal elements of a culture can overlap, collide, and modify one
another? This show understands the notion of passage as a productive oscillation between the subjective and the
objective,the magical and the scientific,the individual and the collective.
​
Please join the Incubation Series VII, March 3-24, 2017. In this edition,the collaborative effort of Art History and Fine Arts graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania features the works of Laura Carlson, Yaochi Jin, Jeremy Jirsa, and Jiwon Woo.

Andes/Amazon: Two Worlds in Peruvian Folk Art looks at two distinct contemporary folk arts in two regions of Peru: the portable retablo shrines, originally from highland Ayacucho and the patterned textiles and ceramics of the Shipibo/Conibo peoples of the Amazon basin. Both are arts in transition. From deep traditional roots they are adapting to new materials and influences and being both enriched and impoverished in the process.

The traditional Peruvian retablo is a portable shrine or nicho that holds figures sculpted of pasta (a mixture of plaster and potato) or maguey cactus wood. The making of retablos is a folk art whose roots go back to the sixteenth century in the Andes (and even to the Greeks and Romans before that). While the art’s origins are religious, the contemporary Peruvian retablos exhibited at Indigo Arts range from the sacred to the profane. Claudio Jimenez Quispé is the acknowledged master of the Peruvian retablo. He and his family are heirs to a multi-generation artistic tradition in the highland region of Ayacucho. Most of the family moved to Lima during the brutal civil war of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, which pitted a violent revolutionary group, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) against equally ruthless government forces. The peasants caught in the middle suffered the deaths or disappearances of some 70,000 people in this period. The effect on the retablo art form was profound. New narratives of social strife and civil war entered the artists’ repertoire. Many contemporary retablos reflect an exposure to the urban world of Lima and beyond, not to mention a response to a world-wide market for folk art. Some of the recent work shows strong influences of Mexican folk art, including scenes of death and the underworld that celebrate the Dias de los Muertos (Days of the Dead) holidays.

The Shipibo-Conibo are an indigenous people (currently numbering only about 20,000) who live along the Ucayali river in the Amazon basin east of the Andes. Though an increasing portion of the Shipibo population have been urbanized in settlements such as Pucallpa, their traditions remain strong, as expressed in their shamanistic religion and in their visionary arts – notably in the patterns that the Shipibo women paint on their pottery, clothing, textiles and their bodies. The ethnologist Angelika Gebhart-Sayer terms their art “visual music”.

The Shipibo are known for labyrinthine geometric designs that reflect their culture and their cosmology. The main elements of the designs are the square, the rhombus, the octagon and the cross, which “represents the southern Cross constellation which dominates the night sky and divides the cosmos into four quadrants…”* Other symbols featured in the designs are the Cosmic Serpent, the Anaconda and various plant forms, notably the caapi vine used in the preparation of the sacramental drug Ayahuasca. There is an intriguing tie between the visual and aural in Shipibo art: “ the Shipibo can listen to a song or chant by looking at the designs, and inversely paint a pattern by listening to a song…”*

The designs are traditionally drawn with natural huito berry pigments on hand-woven cotton fabrics that are worn as wrap-around skirts. The fabric is either natural or dyed with a red-brown dye made from mahogany bark. Today most of the fabric is machine-woven, purchased from traders, and increasingly the hand-drawn designs are supplemented with patterns embroidered with bright-colored commercial yarns. The results can be stunning. The truly psychedelic color combinations are consistent with ayahuasca visions. More often than not the designs are asymmetrical within a border or frame – like a landscape viewed through an airplane window: “Although in our cultural paradigm we perceive that the geometric patterns are bound within the border of the textile or ceramic vessel, to the Shipibo the patterns extend far beyond these borders and permeate the entire world.”* (*Howard G. Charing)

Interference presents the work of Andre Bradley and Paul Anthony Smith, two artists who deal with relationships between personal experience and the social forces that shape our perceptions of self, others, and the world around us. Using distinct but related artistic means, Bradley and Smith explore experiences of selfhood and community as inseparable from the stereotypes and violence that pervade representation of black people.

FJORD Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of SLAP-STICK, a solo exhibition of sculptures, drawings and
performance by New York-based artist and long time Philadelphia Professor Matt Freedman, on view at 1400 N.
American Street, STE 105 from January 12 – February 25 2017. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in
Philadelphia and first with FJORD Gallery.
SLAP-STICK will feature a living inventory of the artist’s recent sculptural and drawing works. The playfully
grotesque and humorously morose stack up against one another in a precarious storeroom, inviting viewers to
inspect and connect works in unusual ways. The exhibition’s layout follows the model of Freedman’s
performative storytelling to create a kind of improvisational academy, reconfiguring elements of the past into
something completely new. In the artist’s words, “Somewhere in the mix we hope to get to something as close as
possible to a moment of truth and to a point of living contact between maker and beholder.”
Over the last decade Freedman has made a variety of works investigating the power of myth and memory in both
the personal and cultural spheres. Drawing on fables as varied as Wile E. Coyote’s unending quest for Road
Runner, the conflation of the Women’s US Open Tennis Final in 2012 with the Tennis Court Oath of 1789 and the
subsequent French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, Freedman weaves together experience and fiction in a museum
that is also an active test site.
Matt Freedman grew up in Chicago, IL and received his B.A. from Harvard and M.A./M.F.A from the University of
Iowa. He has worked as a cartoonist and long time educator at the University of Pennsylvania, mentoring
generations of artists in Philadelphia. He currently works out of his studio in Queens and has held solo exhibitions
at venues including Pierogi Gallery (Brooklyn), vertexList (Brooklyn), Studio 10 Gallery (Brooklyn), Valentine
Gallery (Queens), Flipside (Brooklyn), FiveMyles (Brooklyn), and SculptureCenter (New York). Freedman has
performed at PS1 MoMA (New York), the Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen (New York).

Jessica Doyle’s work centers on the human––engaging philosophy and spirit. Her current body of work draws from and integrates the writings of Nietzsche, in particular, The Gay Science, an influential work addressing the creation of self—what he calls “becoming what one is.” Her scholarly interests include Jung, collective consciousness, virtuality, self, identity, and Other as self.

Doyle earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Tyler School of Art, and her Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from University of Pennsylvania, and she received her PhD in Art Theory, Philosophy, and Aesthetics with Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She teaches graduate courses in Aesthetics and Philosophy with Tiffin University. Her works in drawing, painting, video, and installation have been shown nationally and internationally.

Please join us and celebrate six years of community printmaking at Second State Press! BID on new artwork; BUY our limited edition hand-printed items in the sale shop, and EAT some delicious birthday cake. There will also be plenty of refreshments to quench your thirst including beer from Victory Brewing Company!

Silent Auction- Over 50 of our members have created new editions for our Sixth Annual Member Print Exchange. Follow #SSPExchange to see member prints in process.

NEW Products!- Our Fob Holders have been hard at work designing, printing, and sewing new goods! Pillows, aprons, 2017 calendar tea towels, t-shirts and more will be for sale at the party. Supplies are limited so come early!

InLiquid presents an exhibition of new works by artist member Emily Brett Lukens. Emily Brett Lukens uses resources from nature to create drawings and paintings that represent close-up and far away views of the earth. Her work often reflects her Midwest upbringing, where the view is flat and travel from one location to another allows the viewer time to study the patterns of the landscape.

Her non-representational images are layers of texture-combining acrylic paint, oil stick and collage mediums-creating tension and unique patterns. The images appear when the color resonates through the layered surfaces, making them glow.

Out of 180 submissions in their Annual Contemporary Photography Competition and Exhibition, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC) and Shane LaValette, Director of LightWork, selected two stand-out artists to showcase photographic narratives through concurrent solo exhibitions: Hannah Price and Hrvoje Slovenc. With these compelling artists shown together, they collectively send a powerful message about identity and how it is constructed internally and from the outside world. Through respective explorations of race and immigration, Hannah and Hrvoje’s photos convey meaningful perspectives on how others define us, and how we define ourselves. The two artists’ exhibitions reject stereotypical perspectives and assumed contexts. The exhibitions debut on December 8, 2016 with an artist talk and gallery walkthrough from 6-8pm. They will remain on display in the PPAC gallery through February 25, 2017.Learn more about PPAC here!

” The prints and drawings from my series Translated Cities have developed out of repeat trips to the same neighborhood over a period of eight years. Cao Changdi, which lies on the outskirts of Beijing, is something between village, city, and suburb. ”

Emily Orzech studied at Smith College and received her MFA from the University of Michigan. She spent over a year at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing on a Fulbright grant in lithography. Her current art practice is based at Crane Arts in Philadelphia. She is Assistant Professor of printmaking at Muhlenberg College.emilyorzech.com

We are pleased to present the Prints + Process of Mollie Goldstrom. She will exhibit recent etchings, along with drawings, research, and other critical components to her process. The image here shows preliminary stages of a speculative narrative of time travel and seaweed, human endeavor and folly in drawing and print, enriched by visits to the Rare Book Room of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and late night readings of Lucy Kavaler’s ‘The Wonders of Algae’ (1961).

In Goldstroms words:

The sun was hot. Neddy Merrill sat by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin.
John Cheever, “The Swimmer”

Lucy Kavaler sits at her desk, contemplating how to capture, in prose, an organism that ranges from the unicellular to the complex multicellular: Multiplying in toxic blooms in the hypoxic ocean, is it a harbinger of end times? Fuel, food, fertilizer, will our hopes and dreams proliferate on beds of agar?

A lone figure emerges from the waves, trailing tendrils of Ascophyllum nodosum across sun-warmed granite, and with the tangled strands, spells the word A-L-G-A-E
More info: http://secondstatepress.org/exhibitions/

Mexicanismo reflects an intentional expression of Mexican identity in art which came to its fore in the years following the Mexican Revolution. A selection of prints and paintings of the last 30 years from the Indigo Arts’ collection, the exhibit testifies to the rich legacy of 20th century Mexican art. Mexicanismo illustrates many of the artistic movements unleashed by the Mexican Revolution and the advent of Mexican modernism over a century ago. While not immune to other tendencies in contemporary art of the last three decades, the artists shown here – many from the artistically fertile southern state of Oaxaca – have retained and developed the key characteristics of the period that established the Mexican School in art.

The influence of Los Tres Grandes – painter/muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – persists in the political and cultural awareness of these artists. Oaxacan artist Fernando Olivera shares their heroic vision of the Indio peasant, and has unrelentingly championed the plight of the marginalized and the desaparecidos (the disappeared), particularly among the Tehuana peoples of the Isthmus. Mexico City artist Mario Romero recalls the heroic images of pre-Columbian art, but often uses them in an ironic way, juxtaposing them with modern articles and context. Indigenismo, a celebration of indigenous Mexican culture, inspired Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and particularly that chronicler of Mexican history and culture, Miguel Covarrubias. It lives on in the woodcuts of Oaxacan artist Modesto Bernardo and the prints and paintings of Shinzaburo Takeda. While born in Japan, Takeda has spent his entire adult life in Mexico, and has been called the “mas Mexicano” of Mexican artists. To American viewers this work bears a strong resemblance in style to American work of the Depression and New Deal era. This is no coincidence, because both were influenced by Rivera and the other Mexican muralists.

The Mexican flavor of surrealism embraced by Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo and others is reflected in the elegant work of José Eddie Martinez. The artists of the Oaxacan School in particular became known for a variety of magic realism that was described by poet Alberto Blanco: “The appearance in our history of another time and place; a space within another space; a time within another time.” It infuses the work of the late 20th century maestro, Rodolfo Morales and many that he influenced, including Enrique Flores, Leovigildo Martinez, Felipe Morales, and Fernando Olivera.

The great Mexican engraver, cartoonist and social satirist Guadalupe Posada – while of the generation preceding the Mexican muralists – was the progenitor for much of their political and social art. He introduced the figure of the calavera or skeleton that remains the primary actor of social satire in Mexican art and popular culture today. Both Posada’s political concerns and his dark humor inspired the artists of the Taller de Grafica Popolar (the People’s Graphic Workshop) founded in 1937. Posada’s work also inspires the Guerrero print-maker Nicolas de Jesus (who prints his satiric scenes on traditional amate bark-paper) and the Oaxacan calavera-sculptor and print-maker Carlomagno Pedro.

Indigo Arts has exhibited the fine art and folk arts of Mexico, particularly Oaxaca, since 1986.

About the work being exhibited, Caroline says, “In 2009, I visited the Cy Twombly Gallery located on the grounds of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. Encountering the breadth, scale and intensity of this work in person profoundly impacted me, and I left with a desire to work larger and quicker – counter to my work as a jeweler. I have since expanded my studio practice to include a continuous pursuit of drawing by using a torch or branding tool directly on paper eliminating any additive medium. The resulting works possess a tautness between imagined constructions and emotive suggestion.”

The results of Caroline Gore’s studio practice vary in media, scale and implementation – ranging from small-scale wearable pieces to large sculptural installations and drawings. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts – Houston and numerous private collections. Gore is currently Associate Professor of Jewelry, in the Craft & Material Studies Program at The University of the Arts.